The Plantonic Ideal of Ice

Right now in my backpack I have many things, including, but not limited to, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, two books I had loaned to a friend, a DVD another friend had loaned to that first friend, and an ice cube tray. 

I wanted this ice cube tray since I spotted it at the Whole Foods on Bowery six months ago. The tray is made of a silicone-like, hopefully non-cancerous material, and can hold six three-inch ice cubes. Though I rarely drink liquor, it was easy to image how beautiful one of those large ice cubes would look dissolving into an amber liquid. But when I first saw this ice cube tray, I was already living in Denver, and naturally thought it was absurd to travel home with kitchenware. I would soon find out that no Whole Foods in Colorado carries these ice cube trays. And now, back in New York for two weeks, this ice cube tray was one of my first purchases. It was $8. 

Eight dollars might seem like a lot for ice, but what is $8 in the face of perfection? That was the question I often asked myself while living in New York, in reference to a bowl of Udon soup or an artisan sandwich. While much of New York is out of reach, small, perfect things are easily acquired. It was those small, perfect things that made New York livable for me. Even if I could not afford good light, which a woman who had recently purchased a classic-six on the Upper West Side told me is the most expensive thing in the city, I could afford the very best meatball sub in maybe the whole world. 

There are many things I still love about New York. I love that there is a web site devoted to what people are reading on the train, the way the east coast smells during the spring and the fall, that the Met is free, and that the subway goes all the way to the beach. But it wasn’t until I left that I realized that small, perfect things are just that: small. I’m happy to visit, to read on the train, to make plans to swim in the ocean, to see Juan de Pareja, and to walk my parents’ dog. But I’ll also be happy to go back to a life of imperfect sandwiches and light from the mountains. 

I have a theory about time and art: if it takes you X amount of time to make something, and say, X/10 amount of time for someone else to enjoy it, once eleven people have experienced what you’ve made, your project has proved its worth.

(This theory is based on the idea that we’re all hoping for some form of immortality, without the dementia, and if your art can put more time on the earth for you, you’ve won in some sense. Of course, death remains inevitable.) 

At 287,983 views at 3:09 minutes a pop, which is 15,119 hours or 630 full days, I hope the guy who trained this dog got his time back. Either way, watching this video is time well spent. 

Moths Aren’t My Spirit Animal

There’s a moth situation in Colorado. More specifically, there’s a moth situation in my apartment. But I hear it’s a statewide problem, which makes me feel better about having bugs spinning around the inside of my bedside lamp and lining my walls at night. 

Being of the disposition to find a narrative wherever possible, I’ve been looking for something romantic about moths. But their aggressive and occasionally detrimental love of light just freaks me out. And I don’t appreciate getting out of the shower to find a moth floating out of my bathrobe and fluttering into me. 

But they’re mostly benign. They have no taste for my blood, only my sweaters. And there’s something so sad about their final hours. They fly around like a drunk, unsure of their direction and without the energy to get there. I even feel a bit of sympathy for the ones who are too weak to escape the coming rolled-up magazine. 

Still, there’s something blatantly gross when I find one dead on its own accord, sleeping forever on my bedside table. But these dead bugs bring out the optimist in me. Because what’s grosser than a dead moth? A living one. 

Take That German

courtneylewis:

Petrichor (/ˈpɛtrɨkər/) is the scent of rain on dry earth. The word is constructed from Greek, petra, meaning stone + ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology.

Denver Summer

Before the summer, there is the spring, which can sometimes feel like dating a jerk. Even if the weather or the jerk doesn’t realize it, they’re playing games, getting your hopes up with warm days and flirtatious text messages. But wearing skimpy clothes will not make it warmer or guarantee a call the next day.

During an unseasonably warm week in early March, when every day after work I rode my bike past people drinking outside in sunglasses, I thought spring was ready to commit to summer. That Sunday, I went to Cheesman Park with plans to idle, but spent most of the day waiting for the sun to break through the clouds. It was the first day of Daylight Savings, and my heart was broken. What was the use of long days if the nights were still cold?

Then in April, spring bought me some perfume: Water Drying on Cement. I wish there were more adjectives for smells, but Water Drying on Cement has some of the earthiness of a dog’s paw, but none of the musk. The evaporating water adds a lightness to the smell, like the beach without the salty overtones.

I’ve been through enough springs that I won’t believe its promise of summer until the first time I can wear a t-shirt at night. There’s something about the feeling of dark air against bare arms that makes me feel like everything will be ok. Or at least that I won’t have to worry about layers for a long time. But in Denver, to paraphrase P. Reyner Banham, the heat has a kinship to the light. The air here is so dry that the temperature drops about 15 degrees when the sun goes down. I was afraid that the feeling of walking through warm nights on lit streets would never come. But then the other evening, I went to Wal-Greens in a t-shirt. There may be some disagreements—colder days and rain—but I believe in Denver summer now. And I’m excited.

Me on Cheever; Cheever on Me?

I go back and forth on whether I’m of the disposition to get a quote from American literature tattooed on my flesh, but if I were, the line would be from this passage of “Clementina” by John Cheever: 

The room where she read these letters was warm. The lights were pink. She had a silver ashtray like a signora, and, if she had wanted, in her private bathroom she could have drawn a hot bath up to her neck. Did the Holy Virgin mean for her to live in a wilderness and die of starvation? Was it wrong to take the comforts that were held out to her? The faces of her people appeared to her again, and how dark were their skin, their hair, and their eyes, she thought, as if through living with fair people she had taken on the dispositions and the prejudices of the fair. The faces seemed to regard her with reproach, with earthen patience, with a sweet, dignified, and despairing regard, but why should she be compelled to return and drink sour wine in the darkness of the hills? In this new world they had found the secret of youth, and would the saints in heaven have refused a life of youthfulness if it had been God’s will? She remembered how in Nascosta even the most beautiful fell quickly under the darkness of time, like flowers without care; how even the most beautiful became bent and toothless, their dark clothes smelling, as the mamma’s did, of smoke and manure. But in this country she could have forever white teeth and color in her hair. Until the day she died she would have shoes with heels and rings on her fingers, and the attention of men, for in this new world one lived ten lifetimes and never felt the pinch of age; no, never. She would marry Joe. She would stay here and live ten lives, with a skin like marble and always the teeth with which to bite the meat.

The block quote is worth reading, especially if you think Cheever just wrote about trains leaving Manhattan, plus that one magical realism story about swimming in the suburbs. 

You could say this is a story about a woman marrying well. But it’s also about a woman, who once had no choices, making one. Like any decision, this one comes with compromises, namely being married to an old guy. But it’s a compromise that allows her to live a fuller life and to never lose the passion to enjoy pleasure. The part of me that wants “and always the teeth with which to bite the meat” on my left ribcage woke up from a nap with the Sunday Times littered around my couch and needed a reminder to make the most of my day. But the part of me that will never get this tattoo knows its absurd to have a line from an obscure John Cheever story forever on my side when it’s already in my heart. 

“Her Uterus Was Lined With Daggers” and Another Baby I’m Killing

Here’s a character who just lost her purpose in the story I’m writing:

At the office, Allison Buckley, Joanne’s youngest sister, greeted her. For most of her life, Meredith knew Allison as another blond head in the Buckley Volvo on the way to tennis. But suddenly, Allison was a teenager, and then just as quickly, off to college. A moment later, she was graduating and interested in event planning, just when Meredith could use an assistant. How perfect was that? 

Except it wasn’t perfect at all. Allison came to meetings on time, never early, and she drank too much at the weddings. Today, her hands, always chapped along the knuckles, had a vulgar red nail polish on them, which was already chipping. Meredith herself needed her nails to be just right, otherwise she would pick at the bits of skin that came up along the edges of her fingers until her cuticles were raw.  She didn’t know how Allison could stand it. 

Blame It on the Altitude

One thing I love about Denver, and people in Denver love about Denver, and people talking about Denver love about Denver is its altitude: 5280 feet. I’ve never lived anywhere else at elevation, but the evenness of the number—5280 feet is one mile—makes the fact that we’re living above sea level a constant source of fascination. The number serves as decoration at many coffee shops, lends its name to the Denver lifestyle magazine, and is tattooed on more than a few wrists.

But the number is not just a gimmick: it’s a real part of living here. Boiling water and cooking in general take longer for reasons I once understood for a 9th grade chemistry test. Alcohol is also more potent, and the sun is brighter. There’s less pressure in the air, and less oxygen, too. After months at elevation, I’ll still get out of breath walking up a hill and talking on the phone.

Oxygenation and air pressure are big, if hidden parts of the way we exist. Like God or Mercury in Retrograde, their effects are both far-reaching and not completely understood. So whenever something is off in Denver, the altitude could be the cause. For example, I’m about two minutes early to everything in this city. Must be the air pressure in my bike tires.

If Only There Were a Book Club For Every Literary Experience I Have, Less Than Zero Edition.

I’m almost done with Less Than Zero, or as twitter would call it <0. That, incidentally, is the emoticon for doing a lot of coke and generally being displeased with the riches of modern life. 

I decided to buy <0 after reading the Bret Easton Ellis interview in the Paris Review. I had half-heartedly read American Psycho two years ago, while I got all the stuff about the emptiness of Manhattan life in the 80s, the gore did not appeal to me, and I did not take it seriously.  But I decided to give <0 a serious try, because in his interview, Bret Easton Ellis comes off as a serious writer:

Regardless of how my books have turned out, or how some people might have read them, I clearly don’t think I write trendy knockoffs. My books have all been very deeply felt. You don’t spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I’ve been serious. But I don’t do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don’t write book reviews. I don’t sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don’t go to writer conferences. I don’t teach writing seminars. I don’t hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I’m not concerned with my reputation as a writer or where I stand relative to other writers. I’m not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don’t think about my work and my career in an overarching and systematic way. I don’t think  about myself, as I think most other writers do, as professing toward some ideal of greatness. There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me. 

I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, and I’ve been reading bits of <0  in the middle of what should be a REM cycle. It may be the ideal time to read the book. When I go back to sleep and then wake up, I remember what has happened to the characters, but I have no recollection of my own reading experience, which is perhaps the literary version of doing too much coke at Spago. 


Ellis is right about being a serious writer. Amid all the nihilistic hedonism in the book, there’s a defined aesthetic and a defined moral position. He articulates an idea about the Way We Live Now or The Way They Lived in the 80s. This puts puts Bret Easton Ellis into a category a lot of writers aren’t even trying to get to. For instance, Lorrie Moore, who I love, who Bret Easton Ellis loves, and whose very funny short story is in the same issue of the Paris Review, doesn’t seem to be trying to say something larger about the human condition, Older Single Woman Living In The Midwest edition. That’s ok. She and Bret Easton Ellis are up to different things.  

Spoiler alert: here’s how the Bret Easton Ellis interview ends:  

So this is where I’ve ended up—in a BMW in West Hollywood, doing my Paris Review interview while talking about a Duran Duran biopic pitch … This is where I landed, and that’s fine. 

Whatever you think of Duran Duran, West Hollywood, BMWs or Bret Easton Ellis, he believes in his creative pursuits with autonomy and has made a life that works for him. It’s a hell of a lot more than zero. 

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

It is true that when you wake up in the middle of the night for maybe an hour or so, you don’t remember that time at all, even if you spent part of it reading the New Yorker article on face transplants, which references the Nicholas Cage/ John Travolta movie Face/Off, which is odd because that movie wasn’t any good, even though you also thought about it when you started the article. But when the alarm rings, your body remembers it wasn’t sleeping that whole time, and even if you can wake up enough to make coffee, you still come back into bed, now with the computer, and once you start on the internet, you’re not so sure that the coffee, an accidentally purchased light roast, is worth getting out of bed for, but then you have to, because why did you wake up at 6 am, to watch old episodes of The Hills? 

But the days are getting longer, and that starts in the morning, and the blues you once associated with a certain of morning productivity, happen before you get a chance. So you better get out of bed and go. 

“Get a Life.” “I Have a Life.” “Yeah, I Know All About It.”

It wasn’t too long ago, when bored and inebriated, I decided to buy Beverly Hills, 90210, the complete season 4. Say what you will about Amazon, but they do enable purchases of this sort. 

Some background: Season 4 was the last of the Brenda years, and the gang’s first year at California University, and where, among other things, Brandon joins the Task Force and has an affair with Lucinda Nicholson, Steve rushes KEG and is accused of date rape, Andrea loses her virginity and  becomes pregnant, Kelly and Donna join the Alphas, David develops a problem with Uppers after doing the graveyard shift for KXCU, the campus radio station, and Dylan’s car is hijacked and he meets his long-lost sister. This leaves out Brenda, who in one year, transfers out of Minnesota University, becomes engaged to Stuart Carson after a three week courtship, is arrested for her new-found animal rights advocacy, and takes the lead in the campus production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roofed after rumors circulate of her affair with famed director Roy Randolph. 

I love 90210 for a lot of reasons, not just the plot points. In some ways, it’s a window into the 90s, or some rich producer’s idea of the 90s. There are jean shorts, scrunchies and flowy dresses. It’s not just the aesthetics, it’s the politics: consensual  sex, animal rights, and abortion politics. Out of all the things that strike me as unrealistic about the show, Andrea’s pregnancy is probably the most outrageous, even more absurd than David’s meth habit depending on fresh squeezed orange juice. Obviously, Gabrielle Cartes is about 33 when she’s supposed to be a freshman in college, and in every scene, this fact is impossible to ignore. And yes, she really was pregnant, so there wasn’t much chance of her getting an abortion. But still, the characters act as if her having a baby as a freshman in college is the only option and that Jesse threatening to break-up with her if she has the abortion is tantamount to a proposal. 

Maybe since there was no internet and next day episode summaries,  the writers aren’t too concerned with making the plot make sense. For instance, after rushing off to Vegas to elope with Brenda, Stuart Carson disappears for ten episodes. And what about that episode when Brenda discovers the diary of a young woman who lived in her bedroom decades before and casts the whole gang in her imagination as some version of this woman’s life in 1968? What of it? It’s hard to object any time Dylan McKay is in period clothing. 

I’ve been watching 90210 s4 occasionally with a friend, and emailing plot points to another one in Bulgaria, whose career in Anthropology was in no doubt inspired by Lucinda Nicholson and her penchant for seducing younger men with a traditional feast from an aboriginal tribe in Guatemala. But like I did in the 90s, I’ve been watching this season mostly alone. There’s something oddly satisfying about watching something so unwatchable, and not even be able to confer with the internet about it afterward. It’s like the solitude of the mountains, but in my bed, on a laptop, on a lazy Sunday.